Transmission for Transformation:
On Artistic Pedagogies and Democracy
Fall Symposium
13 – 14 November 2025
Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW
On-site and online
Auditorium D 1.04, Tower Building, HGK Basel FHWN
As part of the symposium series Gender and Equality in the Arts
Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer with Ruth Estévez and Kateryna Botanova
A collaboration of Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and Culturescapes 2025 Sahara
The symposium is open to the public and will be held in English. Free admission.
PROGRAM (subject to alterations)
DAY I – 13 November 2025
Part 1
10.00 am Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer with Ruth Estévez and Kateryna Botanova
10.15 am Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.30 am Sadie Plant
11.15 am Carmen Winant
Noon Lunch break
Part 2
2.00 pm Welcome
2.05 pm Selom Koffi Kudjie
2.45 pm Paul Pfeiffer
3.25 pm Break
3.40 pm Wafa Gabsi
4.20 pm Round-up of DAY I
5.00 pm End of DAY I
DAY II – 14 November 2025
Part 3
10.00 am Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer with Ruth Estévez and Kateryna Botanova
10.15 am Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.30 am Lea Porsager
11.20 am Daniel Bozhkov and Ruth Estévez
Noon Lunch break
Part 4
2.00 pm Edwige Dro
2.40 pm Jurriaan Cooiman
3.00 pm Filipa Ramos
3.35 pm Break
3.50 pm Özgür Demirci
4.30 pm Round-up of DAY II
5.00 pm End of DAY II
On 13 and 14 November 2025, 8 pm, at Kaserne Basel, the performance Is that all there is (2025) by
choreographer Tabea Martin and SoundSisters—a DJ collective from Marrakesh—will take place as part of
the Culturescapes 2025 Sahara festival.
What is the transformative potential of the transmission of knowledge? Transformation at once aesthetic and social, poetic and political, yes, but what else? In a global moment when academies, universities, and cultural institutions are being assailed and defunded by increasingly anti-democratic regimes across the world, the radical importance of artistic education must reassert itself. For its transformative potential is not just for the artists within its systems, but for democratic society and its wildly vulnerable structures at large. Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, in collaboration with Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and Culturescapes 2025 Sahara, will thus dedicate its fall symposium to artistic transmission and transformation writ large, and to the production of pedagogies that can resist the anti-intellectual, supremacist political forces of the present. To create and sustain environments in which artistic practices are nurtured and centered on transformation—across generations and geographies—this is our aim.
The symposium’s participants will include celebrated artists from Skowhegan’s long history, exceptional figures from educational initiatives across Saharan Africa and its diasporas, and those integral to the teaching community of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. All will consider the role of poetic imagination and artistic solidarity in self-reflective and communal practices. Each will describe those remaining places—real and true—where artists and thinkers might rehearse their imaginations. For all believe in the transformative possibilities of artistic life—one based in the social—as well as those future generations who might further such knowledge. The symposium is part of the biannual symposia series, ongoing since 2018, curated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. In February 2026, Transmission for Transformation will have a second iteration at Skowhegan’s program space in New York.
The symposium is dedicated to the memory of Refaat Alareer.
Links
https://dertank.ch/symposia/#transmission-transformation
https://www.skowheganart.org/home
https://culturescapes.ch/de